Venice's Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters. Lauer, Rena. 2014. Venice's Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, Citation and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Accessed April 17, 2018 5:00:20 PM EDT Citable Link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:12274135 This article was downloaded from Harvard University's DASH Terms of Use repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA (Article begins on next page) Venice’s Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete A dissertation presented by Rena Nechama Lauer to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts March 2014 © 2014 Rena Nechama Lauer All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Daniel Lord Smail Rena Nechama Lauer Venice’s Colonial Jews: Community, Identity, and Justice in Late Medieval Venetian Crete Abstract This dissertation offers a social history of the Jews of Candia, Venetian Crete‘s capital, by investigating how these Jews related to their colonial sovereign, their Latin and Greek Christian neighbors, and their diverse co-religionists in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Latin ducal court records, Hebrew communal ordinances, and notarial materials reveal the unique circumstances of Venetian colonial rule on Crete, including the formalized social hierarchy dividing Latin and Greek Christians, ready access to the Venetian justice system, and Venetian accommodation of pre-colonial legal precedents. Together, these elements enabled and encouraged Jews—individuals and community alike—to invest deeply in the institutions of colonial society. Their investment fostered sustained, meaningful interactions with the Latin and Greeks populations. It even shaped the ways in which Jews engaged with one another, particularly as they brought their quotidian and intracommunal disputes before Venice‘s secular judiciaries. Though contemporary religious authorities frowned upon litigating against co-religionists in secular courts, people from across the spectrum of Candiote Jewry, from community leaders to unhappily married women, sought Venetian judicial intervention at times. Beyond a history of one Jewish community‘s encounter with the institutions of empire, this study opens a window into a medieval Jewish society unconstrained by lachrymose discourse. The result is an unexpected image of medieval Jews as individuals who made religious and personal choices, in contrast to the still-dominant representation of the tradition-bound, community-minded premodern Jew. At the same time, this project stresses that the study of Jews gains new depth and power when it is elevated from the isolation of ethnic studies and woven into mainstream historical iii Dissertation Advisor: Daniel Lord Smail Rena Nechama Lauer analysis. It situates Jewish interaction with the Venetian Empire within a broader discussion of conceptions of premodern colonialism, community and individuality, and minority heterogeneity. Finally, it argues that because of the central place held by law in both the maintenance and malleability of imperial structures, an exploration of the relationship between Jews and colonial judiciaries offers insight essential to building a broad understanding of relations between minorities and their host empires. iv Table of Contents List of Images ............................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... v A Note on Usage ......................................................................................................................... viii Introduction: Jews and the Jewish Community of Venetian Crete ......................................... 1 Sources of Jewish History on Venetian Crete ........................................................................... 8 Jewish Life in Christian Society .............................................................................................. 15 Individuals and Community .................................................................................................... 19 Jews in Court ........................................................................................................................... 24 Venice, Crete, and the World of the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean ........................... 29 A New Social World................................................................................................................ 36 Frontier Justice ........................................................................................................................ 40 Part I: Networks of Community and Identity .......................................................................... 47 Chapter One: The Kehillah Kedoshah in Context: Leadership, Communal Life, and Jewish Space in Venetian Candia .......................................................................................................... 49 Leading an Evolving Kehillah Kedoshah ................................................................................ 54 The Judaica ............................................................................................................................. 62 Ambivalent Segregation .......................................................................................................... 70 Surveilling Other Jews............................................................................................................. 78 Conclusion: Elite Leadership, Community, and the Individual in Candia .............................. 83 Chapter Two: Jewish Cultural Complexity and Mobility: Demographics and Influences in a Colonial Island Community .................................................................................................... 85 Demographics .......................................................................................................................... 90 A Multi-Ethnic Jewish Community ......................................................................................... 93 Mobility and Trade: Candia‘s Larger Jewish Networks ........................................................ 112 Cultural Borrowing, Cultural Anxiety: Ashkenazi and Sephardi Ideas on Crete .................. 123 Conclusion: Mobility and Heterogeneity .............................................................................. 135 Chapter Three: State, Society, and Jewish-Christian Professional Relationships ............. 140 Rhetorics of Contagion and Contact ...................................................................................... 146 Venetian State Support of Jewish Medical Practitioners....................................................... 154 The Notary and the Wise Jew ................................................................................................ 165 Beyond the State: Creating a Culture of Contact .................................................................. 170 The Implications of Contact for Religious Communities ...................................................... 184 Conclusion: Religion and the Axes of Identity ..................................................................... 187 Part II: Jewish Justice in the Colonial Courtroom ................................................................ 193 iv Chapter Four: Jewish Subjects and the Ideology of Venetian Justice ................................. 194 Colonial Jews: Subject Status and its Implications ............................................................... 197 Justice as Imperial Ideology .................................................................................................. 201 The Practical Benefits of Delivering Justice ......................................................................... 212 Law and Statute in the Stato da Mar ..................................................................................... 217 Colonial Law and Flexible Justice in Crete ........................................................................... 221 Local Custom and Jewish Law in the Cretan Courtroom ...................................................... 223 Legal Flexibility for Jews: Between Protection and Limitation ............................................ 226 Conclusion: Justice and the Myth of Venice ......................................................................... 228 Chapter Five: Jew versus Jew in Secular Court .................................................................... 234 Internal Justification: Dinah De-Malkhutah Dinah ............................................................... 239 Choosing the Venetian Court ................................................................................................ 242 Sources of Discord: Litigation beyond Business ................................................................... 261 Conclusion: Rationalizing the Secular Court .......................................................................